How to Convert a Comma Separated TXT File to XLS

Video Transcript

"I'm Jonathan Ayres with Network For Success and today we're going to talk about how to convert a comma separated TXT file to XLS. What is a comma separated TXT file and what is an XLS file? Both of these are formats that are use to save files and setup programs like Microsoft Excel. And that's the one we'd all be most familiar with because everybody has Microsoft Excel, if they have Microsoft Office or other Microsoft products. Now why would you want to convert a file from one format to another even though the program would read both? Well, a good reason might be that you'd be sending it to someone who had a program that it could only read a comma separated TXT file or could only read an XLS file. So today we're going to show you how to convert a TXT file to an XLS file and I have on the screen in front of me a simple text file inside of Microsoft Excel, which is the program and this file currently sits in a comma separated TXT format. Now it looks just normal to you as you look at the screen, but what we're going to do is convert it to an XLS format to send to someone else and we'll see what that looks like. Let's find out how to do that. First thing we do when we look at the screen here is we find out where file is. In the upper left hand corner, we go to file and we go to save as because we're going to save this file in a different format. So we click on save as then we get a box that shows us where we're going to save it and what we're going to save it as and what the name is going to be. So I'm going to save this on the desktop, you see in the left hand side here, I'm going to click on desktop. Then I'm going to put a filename in down here and I'm going to put in SBIA cluster which is the name of this file. And then it says save as and it says save as as a comma separated file, also known as comma delimited, I'm going to change that. I'm going to hit the drop down arrow here and I'm going to scroll until I find the Microsoft Office Excel Workbook format; that is your .XLS format. So I'm going to click on that and then I'm going to click on save and now the program is going to convert over the file to the XLS format. And when it's done converting, then it will have a .XLS extension. And even though you don't see that here, if you were to go back to file and click on save as and do it again, you would notice that it says "save as type" because it has already changed the type. So that's the easy way to convert it. It's a very simple two or three-step procedure and anyone can do it."